Saturday, January 06, 2007

New Year's Eve Violence in Chicago's "Gay House"

On New Year's Eve, two masked men walked into a party being held at a house in Chicago's mostly African-American South Side neighborhood and shot six people. All six were gay black men and the Chicago Sun Times initially reported that police were investigating whether the shootings were bias-related. Neighbors said that the house was known to many as "the gay house."

As Keith Boykinwrites on his blog, if the shootings weren't disturbing enough, some neighbors interviewed for the local nightly news told reporters basically that the gay men didn't belong in the neighborhood anyway, implying that gays "need to go back to the suburbs" because the South Side of Chicago is "a regular, normal neighborhood for straight people."

Interestingly, Rod McCullum, who has been following developments on his blog Rod2.0 and is preparing a report for The Advocate Online, says that the incident might actually be a case of gay-on-gay violence: In an exclusive advance posted on his blog today, McCullum says that authorities now believe that the incident seems to be the result of a "feud or rivalry" between Chicago "ballroom houses."